Metas

Meta-Analyses of Risk Factors for Self-Injurious Thoughts and Behaviors (1965-Present)

it's hard to advance knowledge if you don't know what's known

Our first step is to try to figure out what science currently knows about our phenomena of interest. Meta-analyses are a great way to summarize and understand current knowledge. We have an ongoing project that collects all information on risk factors (i.e., longitudinal predictors) for our primary interest -- self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITBs). This project has produced many surprising and sobering findings. As we publish papers from this project, we will include detailed information about specific findings (all pictures below represent submitted papers and will become active links once published).

For now, we note three overarching findings from this project:

Science's ability to predict SITBs is only slightly better than chance

Science's ability to predict SITBs has not improved across 50 years of research and several hundred papers

Researchers have essentially conducted the same studies over and over again for the last several decades